At 09:25 AM 2/13/99 -0800, SRE wrote:
>I've also considered using the Majordomo "delete_headers" option
>to boink the MIME line - all the stuff would be there, but it would
>be ugly and might not be interpreted by a client??? If it works,
>this would be a way to let people see what plain text clients see.
some mail clients will figure out you have done this and recover, because they expect
to do it for badly formatted digests....which is the sort produced by Majordomo.
Other stuff comes through uuencoded, and that has to be searched for inline.
>I'm already deleting some headers like "X-Juno-Line-Breaks" because
>any software that adds a fronter (or header) to the message itself
>breaks juno-to-juno email. I hate formatting stuff that's stuck in
>using non-standard headers, and I hate it even more when a provider
>makes it so you can't use list features without junking up the message.
I shoot the advertising trailers as well.
>Right now it's more of an issue with people who can't view the message.
>Same problem with unwrapped paragraphs - there are still mail clients
>out there that will NOT wrap lines, so people only get to read the
>first 80 characters of each paragraph. Ugh. I reluctantly went back to
>hard-wrapping lines because of so many complaints.
Yep.
>Even if everyone could read it, allowing binary attachments is a good
>way to waste bandwidth and distribute viruses. You want pretty? Get
>a free website (like geocities) and post the URL. You want email?
>Just send text. Of course, those people who attach both PC and Mac
>Word documents after pasting in the plain text get really pissed off
>when their post bounces... but if it doesn't bounce, the Unix people
>get really pissed off at receiving TWO useless binary files. Sigh.
>
>Now what about these "vcard.vcf" things? Anyone choosing to bounce
>those? They look like attachments in Eudora, but they're really not.
Actually, they really are. For a single part text message with a vcard, the top level
is multipart/mixed, then inside there is, likely a text/plain (or a
multipart/alternative) and a text/x-vcard. Since no mailer other than Netscape can be
expected to know what to do with their unregistered attachment, it gets turned into a
file by Eudora, for example. It really is a unrenderable attachment.
Here is a sample one I happened to have on file:
Content-Type: text/x-vcard; charset=us-ascii; name="vcard.vcf"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit
Content-Description: Card for StrAngE
Content-Disposition: attachment; filename="vcard.vcf"
begin: vcard
fn: StrAngE
n: ;StrAngE
org: ThE ceReAl KiLleRz
adr: [EMAIL PROTECTED];;;Los Angeles;CA;90638;uSa
email;internet: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
title: > tHE chOsen OnE <
tel;home: 562.941.XXXX
note: ICQ # 2669033
x-mozilla-cpt: ;0
x-mozilla-html: TRUE
version: 2.1
end: vcard
Nothing in there I'd bother rendering. :-)
>
>Finally, has anyone played around with deleting attachments but
>letting the plain text go through? Or would that be an ethical
>problem of editing the user's post?
http://scifi.squawk.com/demime.html :-) Do I sound like a broken record?
Help stamp out mime in your lifetime. Just last week it deleted two instances of
happy99 that were sent through lists I run. When I actually remove an attachment, I
leave a plain text note in the text. If users want to send attachments to each other,
they can do it directly.
My users don't worry what format their messages are sent in - demime strips them all,
picks the most formattable section and renders it in plain text if it ain't there
already. I think I'm doing the right thing with multipart/mixed and
multipart/alternative, and message/rfc822 and whatever else is there - I'm not finding
things it does not handle. I wrote this because I had a user whose mail was being
changed from plain text to mime by her mail relay, and because I was getting tired of
telling people how to send plain text.
--
You might be a redneck if --
Your BBQ has its own license plate.
Nick Simicich mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] or (last choice) mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
http://scifi.squawk.com/njs.html -- Stop by and Light Up The World!
